Chapter Project

to finish up this chapter let’s review what we’ve talked about with a little project we’ll just go over a few simple steps that will allow us to practice some of the concepts in this chapter most chapters in this video will have a similar project at the end let’s begin to start off let’s make a brand new file you may be in a new file already but we’re going to start off with the brand new file so that we get familiar with the process and all the steps involved in it there are several ways as we talked about to start a new file you can just type in new but let’s go through a lot of the steps to get you used to working with the ribbon go up to the application menu which is that big red a in the top left corner click new drawing this opens up the template folder we want to use the template file called a CAD DWT
click open
and here we go
we want to create an arc
drawing using feet and inches for our units so we need to click on the application menu again to check our units
you ladies
and then units
okay we need to set this up it’s already in inches and it should be for you if not click on the arrow and select inches now we want to go to architectural so you go to the link type architectural precision of one sixteenth of an inch is fine for this project as for the angles let’s make them decimal degrees and a precision with one decimal place for what we’re going to do this will be satisfactory and click OK
now it’s always a good practice to save your file early on and then very regularly after that there’s always a chance that something will happen and you’ll lose your work
AutoCAD crashes especially once you get into a very complicated file and then when you start adding references to other CAD files or to other datasets etc then it just bogs it down and if your hardware isn’t up to snuff then you could have troubles and if your hardware is absolutely top of the line it could still be a problem so it’s just a common thing that happens with AutoCAD it’s not your fault
it’s just happens so you have to be prepared for it so let’s save the file you can save it anywhere that you’d like to but make sure it’s in a place where you know where to go I suggest making a folder for all of your CAD work here somewhere on your computer on an external hard drive a jump drive something you could even save your work in Autodesk 360 which is Autodesk’s cloud-based support platform there you’ll be able to save files to the cloud and you can access them from anywhere you can even access them from your mobile device if your hard drive crashes if your computer explodes and bursts into flames you’ll still have your files available to you on the cloud AutoCAD 2013 and AutoCAD LT 2013 have a lot of integration built into it with the cloud so let’s save the file click on the application menu
and you can click save because we started with a template file so it’s not saved already browse to a place where you want to save it and save it you have some options here so you can set up your automatic online saving properties just click on it it will open up your information give you some information and data on how much cloud space you’ve used I’ve only used 5.7 megabytes of the 3 gigabytes that are provided free to every customer but you can enable the cloud storage you can even sync your settings in AutoCAD and you can set it to automatically save every file you work on now if you’re working with a lot of files that are very large and have a lot of memory you could fill up that 3 gigabytes so so be careful for now you may want to keep it on but it’s up to you and to get to Autodesk 360 you can click on the button here
when you’re done click OK and that will save your settings if you want to save it to Autodesk 360 you can just click right here
that will open up a four
you have automatically saved up in your hard drive that automatically syncs with the cloud save your files here if you’d like
we’re going to name this file chapter project
this is Chapter four
call it chapter 4
project
you can call it whatever you’d like then click Save
now since this file has been synced to the cloud every time you save it your cloud file will be updated you can go to the online tab right here on the ribbon to sync your files to look at your files that you have to upload them to download them etc
alright that was a little extra I threw in there but let’s get back to where we’re at on our chapter project so now that we’ve set up our file set the units and we’ve saved it keep in mind that it’s a good practice to save your file regularly so save early and save often there’s always a chance that something will happen and you’ll lose your work and that’s bad so let’s draw something and we haven’t talked a lot about drawing something but that’s coming now we’ve built a foundation on how to interact with AutoCAD and then we understand the interface now and we know where things are and so if we need to find something we can so let’s take a look here let’s draw a rectangle now to do that you can just come up to the home tab on the ribbon and the draw a panel and click a rectangle
now we just want to draw something here so that we have an object to work with so you can pick anywhere on your screen pick your first point with the left click of the mouse move it up to the top right just anywhere it can be small it can be large it won’t matter and click again and there you go you drew a rectangle good job now
we’re going to do something else with the grid
a CAD DWT file the grid is on early should be if it’s not that’s fine but we want to turn it on so if it isn’t you can come down here to your status bar toggle it off or on by clicking it or you can press the f7 key
to turn on our snap functionality but let’s set some of this stuff up first come down to your status bar right click and go to settings
this will get you to your settings here there are a lot of different things you can mess with bowler tracking object snap 3d objects now but not in AutoCAD LT and how are your snapping grid this is what we want to do so let’s turn it on right now it’s set to space everything at half of an inch because we’re using architectural units of inches one unit is one inch long so keep that in mind when we’re drawing now let’s tell it to make a grid line every 10 units so let’s change this to 10 because that’s what we’re going to snap to and we want it to be equal x and y spacing so keep that locked in and now come down here for the grid type in 10 units
okay
now you can see here our grid is quite large
but that’s okay make sure your snap mode is turned on and let’s do some work so pick the rectangle
you can use a crossing window you can use an inclusion window you can use the fence or you can just select it because it’s a little small we want to get rid of it once you’ve selected it you can use the erase command which is right here on the ribbon and the modify panel or once you’ve selected something you can press the Delete key and that’s the same as erasing so that’s a real quick tip if you want to get rid of something select it and then hit the Delete key it’s very quick very efficient now let’s double click on the scroll wheel this will do a zoom extents see we don’t have anything here so that’s okay so now with your snap mode on let’s start to draw something let’s use your scroll wheel to zoom in or zoom out pan around a little bit and one thing you might find that happens in AutoCAD is once you zoom out so far it won’t let you zoom anymore this is an old setting that’s in AutoCAD that’s been around for a long time and it just sort of says I can’t go any farther so what you need to do is execute what’s called a regen all and that is just typing in our EA that will refresh the screen refresh the drawing area it’s all AutoCAD – hey reset doesn’t delete anything it doesn’t change anything it just sort of clears out the memory and clears out a little bit of stuff on your screen smooths out arcs and circles and allows you to zoom out again I see even your pan will get stuck just like this this is going to happen to you all the time
so just remember Rea
and there you go
it gets real
the time but once you know what to do it’s a quick fix to get through it now let’s start drawing a line let’s type line on the command line press Enter let’s draw a triangle now remember that we’re snapping to specific places on the grid that can help us line up our lines very easily
so pick a point
snap
snap again
then just snap to the end
there’s a triangle see
easily the snap function allowed us to work if we draw a line again it can come to this point and draw in some more triangles
until I finish off the command and there you go
it’s very easy
to draw things with snap-on
quick
very simple
so if you’re an architect
room
you can set up your grid work so that it’s to a certain unit
and that unit could be you know the width of your wall it could be you know one foot one meter
you can very quickly draw some shapes the wrong spot here so let’s undo that go up to your quick access toolbar and click the undo arrow well it undid my whole inside box yes because we did all of that in one command and one function so we need to draw that back draw a line start the line command again
and let’s draw
we’ll keep the width of this box on the inside of the other box
so just one grid space wide when you’re done press Enter
okay so we’ve drawn some things that snapped – now let’s zoom out and let’s draw some lines making another box to exact coordinates so start the line command again
AutoCAD to go to specific coordinates let’s go to coordinate 10 comma 60 Center
units are in inches so coordinate of 10 brings us right to this snap point anyway is that ten inches along the x-axis and then a coordinate of sixty will brings us up sixty inches on the y-axis
so that’s great so if we want to draw a line now that is
50 units long well we can snap to five different places here on the grid because we have set up our grid to be 10 units long or we can just do the math on the coordinates since we’re at x coordinate of 10 we need to go to x coordinate of 60 and that will put us at 50 units wide so to tell autocad that hey we want to draw two coordinates again you need to first start with the pound key and then type in our first unit which is going to be 50 and then comma and we’ll draw it at 60 this will put us at a horizontal line to the right 50 units long press enter
and there is our line drawing two coordinates can be difficult and tedious because you have to know exactly where you need to put it and typically that won’t be the case there are exceptions of course surveyors all the time will draw two coordinates because they know where the coordinates are for the points and you know if they’re getting property corners or something like that so that will happen we can also draw a line in the direction at a specific length so if we draw a line will snap to right here
let’s say we want it to be fifty units long and press the tab key and as you can see this line is now 50 units long and any angle direction that we want to go to
click the button and there you go it’s very simple very easy to do so there are a lot of ways to work within AutoCAD let me show you another little trick here let’s draw a line again
pick a point
type in the @ symbol this will tell AutoCAD to go to a specific length and then angle so type in 3 tab
then hit the less than sign
then 90
press Enter
that drew a line three units long at 90 degrees
we can do that in a different way as well we can just type in 20 and then hit tab and then type in an angle of 45 I can put on and we’ll get more in-depth about it later you can do things a little bit differently but if you turn your dynamic and put off you have to type in the @ symbols and the pound symbols and the less than to get the different angles and things double click your mouse scroll wheel to do a zoom extents you may even want to zoom out a little bit so you can see everything very clearly on your screen and press control s at the same time there you just saved your file now remember get into a habit of doing a control s draw a little bit control s draw a little bit more control s etc this is a quick and easy way to make sure that you don’t lose your work then congratulations you’ve just made your very first AutoCAD drawing